What makes my perspective more literary than yours? Nothin’. I’ve just spent so long in grad school that I’ve become bitter and arrogant… Problem? So, today Amazon announced the Kindle, its new eBook reader and the reaction has been expectedly mixed. While some seem pleased with the free wireless bookstore and clean, effective interface, others are less happy about the expensive content and the Kindle’s ample supply of ugliness.

But as my general interest is the intersection of technology and culture, what struck me was how the introduction of the Kindle reveals how we often think of ‘books’. Most analysis of the Kindle has treated books like any other form of ‘content’ – that charming modern term that reduces all art and knowledge to a commodity. I know, I know: at the end of the day it is a commodity. It’s just very very annoying. But despite how pragmatic the ‘books-as-content’ approach is – the publishing business is after all a multi-billion dollar industry – what this approach misses is that the sort of person most likely to pick up the Kindle is precisely the sort of contrarian who is going to fervently insist that “books are art dammit’, not just things to be bought and sold!”. The Kindle is obviously going to be pitched to the book-lover, the sort of person who has fetishised books and the aesthetic experience of reading: the smell of a leather-bound work, the feel of paper on one’s fingers, to make no mention of the cultural significance we attach to literature or simply ‘curling up with a good book’.

My point is that books, perhaps even more than records or films, are cultural artefacts as much as they are ‘content’ and also, that despite Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ grand proclamations, the revolution in reading will probably not come as a result of the Kindle. What the Kindle does well is to provide the convenience of digital to book lovers. What it fails at – and this is something it cannot help at all – is replicating or engaging the centuries-old valorization of ‘the book’. We are obviously not simply casting away CDs and replacing them with MP3s – we are changing a cornerstone of something we have used to define culture. And while I firmly believe that eBooks will be part of the broader cultural shift from a text-based society to a screen-based one, what no-one is yet able to deal with is the simple fact that the nature of reading is changing: how we read and what we read is undergoing a profound shift that has to do with much more than simply how we get our books. We are in the midst of a unprecedented cultural and epistemological shift of which the Kindle may only be a part.

I am by no means decrying the Kindle. Quite to the contrary, I am hoping that Amazon sees fit to release it Canada around the same time packets of money start falling from the sky into my backyard. That said, I wonder about the digitization of books – not as a luddite clinging to his leather-bound copy of Hamlet – but simply as a reader and a technophile who is skeptical of the market potential for reading Kafka, Joyce or Rushdie on the subway in the way one might use an iPod. And not to sound too much like Sven Birkerts, but what I think bears some thinking about is how the shift from page to screen will change how we conceive of reading: will it still be seen as an inherently edifying activity, or one that has a external goal? Will literature retain its sense of authorship and permanency? Will ‘the text’ become even more fluid than Derrida imagined? And will what constitutes the ‘literary’ start to shift as the words on the page become even more unstable than any post-structuralist theorist from the sixties was able to imagine?

If you have any thoughts, hit the comments and lemme’ know what you think

[Update]: Nick Carr has his take on it here – and has conveniently skipped out on the last fifty years of intellectual progression as I so self-righteously argue in the comments.

[Update 2]: As Nick points out in the comments, arguing for the inherent superiority of contemporary approaches to literature is stupid. I still, however, think his prioritization of the individual author is simply a mode of reading – and an unpopular one at that too.

[Update 3]: That it is unpopular is irrelevant. It’s been bugging me for ages that I wrote that. What’s important is that Carr’s argument that the integrity of a work comes from it being created by an individual author is something that has been thoroughly critiqued. It’s not that it’s ‘wrong’, of course – rather that it turns reading into a game of ‘what did the author mean?’ thereby constraining how we view texts.